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Wednesday, 16 July 2014

Huawei's Lampsite

Huawei unveiled its 'Lampsite' for 'Deep Indoor Coverage' back in 2013. This is what they announced then:

LampSite includes a comprehensive set of BBU, RemoteHUB(rHUB) and PicoRRU(pRRU) products along with accompanying transmission solutions. The compact pRRU supports multiple bands and modes and can simultaneously support LTE TDD, LTE FDD, UMTS and GSM. A LampSite indoor coverage network can also be deployed simultaneously with Huawei’s SingleRAN solution.

Thanks to BBU’s baseband sharing feature, one fiber is used for several cells, saving up to 87% of fiber typically used for indoor deployments. rHUB connects to pRRU by cable, and support power over Ethernet (PoE) to simplify site construction and reduce total deployment costs.

In an early deployment phase, individual pRRU cells aggregate into one cell to reduce interference. Once the network offloads heavy traffic, the cells are split again and Adaptive SFN is enabled to balance capacity and interference. Huawei iManager system and evaluation tools are then used to accurately monitor and intelligently optimize indoor hotspot traffic.

This innovative solution has not only helped them to win contracts with China Unicom, TDC Denmark and Telenor Norway but according to TMN magazine article, "Huawei is shipping more than 10,000 PRRUs (Pico Remote Radio Units) per month in some countries and regions for its LampSite in-building system, according to Peter Zhou, Huawei's President of Small Cell & WiFi, Wireless Network."

Recently Huawei and Telenor also won an award in the LTE World Summit for "Innovation in HetNet Development". With Huawei’s LampSite, Telenor is able to provide average downlink throughput of 46Mbps at any location in a building and significantly cut costs. Deployment of each pico Remote Radio Unit takes only three hours – from site survey, through installation, commissioning, to going live, ensuring rapid rollout in areas with weak signal penetration.

Based on presentations in different events, looks like Huawei is not complacent with its achievements. It plans to develop the next generation or NG Lampsite to achieve 1Gbps Indoor throughput with whole lot of technologies to help achieve this. Multi-stream Aggregation (MSA) being the key. See my earlier post on MSA on the 3G4G blog here.

Peter Zhou, Huawei's President of Small Cell & WiFi, Wireless Network. says the following in the TMN Mag article:But how do they differ?

First off, LampSite, Zhou said, is not a DAS. "I would say it is different because in a DAS all the antenna connect to one radio unit, sharing one radio unit resource so it's one cell. LampSite is antenna and radio unit together, so the small box [PRRU] itself can be regarded as one small cell. That's different and that's why we regard LampSite as an indoor cloud baseband solution, with all these small units connecting to one base station indoor," Zhou said.

Zhou said the "simple difference" between LampSite and [Ericsson's] Radio Dot is that "Dot just supports one mode, we support multi-modes and multi-band. Dot sits in the middle between DAS and LampSite. LampSite is a very deep evolution on traditional network deployment."

Manoj is right ,Radio DOT also supports multiple bands and multiple technologies, there are three vital differences between the lampsite and radio dot. 1) interface is different ,lampsite is CPRI interface,radio dot is private Intermediate Frequency interface. 2)transmission is different,pico RRU need two RJ45 interfaces,one CATE5E/6 support 2x2 MIMO 20MHZ bandwith, radio do only need one RJ45 interface,one CATE5E/6 support 2x2 MIMO 40MHZ bandwith.therefore the lampsite rHUB with 8 RJ45 interface only support 4 pico RRUs,but Ericsson IRU with 8 RJ45 interface only support 8 radio dots. 3)power consumption and cost are different,pico RRU consist of digtal IF(Intermediate Frequency ) front end and radio front end and antenna,but radio dot only consist of the radio front end and antennal without the digtal IF front end,the digtal IF front end is integrated into the IRU(Indoor Radio Unit).so the radio dot is suited to the PoE solution.

hi,Atul,IMO, It is true that the lampsite and radio dot are competing with Cisco/NEC/Alu Small/Femtocells in market,because the lampsite and radio dot are integrated with the macro network,so there are many coordination control functions between the smallcell and the macro cell,such as the soft handover and CoMP and ICIC or eICIC functions,these functions can obtain gains in case of some interference scenarios. and the Cisco/NEC/Alu Small/Femtocells have no the coordination control functions between the smallcell and the macro cell.